VAYIKRA: CHESED KINDNESS WANTED: RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL: JEWISH SPIRITUAL RENEWAL

“Teach Your Children Well”

This week’s Torah portion brings us to the beginning of the Book of  Leviticus. It was so named by church leaders as it is full of the laws and rituals incumbent upon the priesthood. Its Hebrew name however is  Vayikra, meaning “He called.” If you take a moment and open your Chumash  (Five Books of Moses), you will note that the Aleph, which is the last letter of the word Vayikra, is written in a smaller font than the other letters.

Rabbi Bunam, a leading Chassidic rebbe at the turn of the nineteenth century in Poland said that the smallness of the aleph actually gives prominence to the  letter as if it were a separate word. The word “aleph” means “to teach” and also “to lead.” (The modern Hebrew word for a general in the Israeli army is derived from this word.) It implies that one should learn to be humble, even if he or she is a teacher or a leader. Rabbi Bunam reminds us that Moses, our greatest prophet, was the humblest man in history.

As we read through our portion we note that its entirety is about sacrifices. Again, we are given a mistranslation of our Hebrew. The Hebrew word is  korban, or offering. It comes from the root word meaning “coming near.”

Offerings were the means to bring ourselves closer to God. But if God is omnipotent and lacking in form, what does God need of our farm animals?

Was it just to keep the priests on a high-cholesterol diet? Was this the original high-protein weight loss diet?

Of course God has no need for our offerings. Maimonides (the Rambam- Rabbi Moses ben Maimon) in his Guide for the Perplexed says that we had become accustomed to this ritual dependency from other pagan sacrificial rites we had witnessed. He posits that the Torah amended these rites into something more palatable. But why would these laws continue into the days of the Second Temple when the pagan  rituals of Egypt were long behind us?

Nachmanides (the Ramban- Rabbi Moses ben Nachman) writes that  these korbanim relate to various aspects of our need for exoneration for  various sins that we as humans commit regularly. The ultimate ritual of spilling the blood of an animal is to remind us of how precious life is and how close  we are to having our own lives taken without warning.

When we as modern liberal Jews do teshuvah for our sins, do we “return” and come closer to God? What do we offer? What is our korban? What is our sacrifice? Rabbi Samson Hirsch says a sacrifice implies giving up  something  that is of value to one’s self for the benefit on another. An offering is a gift that satisfies the receiver.

Since we now understand that God does not  need our offerings, we come to the realization that the offerings were to OUR  benefit! We were the giver, but we also were the receiver. We needed them to deal with the emotions we had from private and communal sinning, guilt, and  dishonesty. We also needed korbanim   to ask for peace. But DID we then  and DO we now?

Our Jewish Spiritual Renewal is for us, but also for those we come in contact with.

“I desired Chesed-kindness, and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more  than burnt offerings” (Hoshea 6:06). The writings of the prophets give us another  way of coming closer to God. The rabbis in the Talmud do as well. But this way  takes a lot more effort, sacrifice, and offering than did our bringing our prized live stock to our priests. It also takes a lot more effort than  today’s “checkbook Judaism” requires.

“The human being who only does good and never sins does not exist on  earth” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). We are continually making errors. It is part of  the human condition. It would be wonderful if we could always learn from our mistakes, fix any problems we caused, and not repeat them. And even better  still, it would be grand if we could teach others of our errors, so that they  would not make the mistakes that we have made. Within time, if this worked,  the 11 o’clock news would be a half hour of weather reports.

In Deuteronomy we will read in chapter 11, verse 13, in what we call the  Shema, that we are to “love the Lord your God and to serve Him with all your  heart and with all your soul.” In the Talmud (Tractate Ta’anit 2A), the  rabbis ask, “What is the service of the heart?” And they answer “prayer.”

Many of us think we know what prayer is. Again, we are saddled with a mistranslation. Tephila comes from the root of hitpallal, to judge one’s self. We are not praying to God, asking for things to be given to us,  although at times, that is what is seems like.

True prayer, with full  kavenah, intention and concentration, should be like an intensive  psychotherapy session. We need to take a daily (if not bi- or tri-daily as we traditionally did), accounting of our blessings, our actions, our good deeds, and our errors. Even the Hebrew word for sin means to miss the mark, as an arrow that has not made contact with its target.

In archery we know that  with time, patience, and practice we will hit our targets more often than not. If when we pray, we do real tephila, real self-judging, and learn  from our errors, do teshuvah and try to fix the harm we have caused others, we will have made a modern korban and will have come closer and more intimate with God and our own souls.

We are now in the month of Adar (2) when the holiday of Purim occurs.  In the above quoted Talmud Ta’anit (29a) the rabbis write that “when Adar arrives, we increase our joy.” They teach that Adar is the best month to try to remove personal barriers to holiness. The rabbis counsel that true happiness is not achieved by satisfying our corporal needs, but rather is achieved by using the wonderful pleasures of this world to gain spirituality. Adar’s zodiac sign is  the fish. I am a Pisces (and I am known to be a bit spaced and sometimes out  of touch with the nuts and bolts of daily existence).

Fish do not have eyelids. Our eyes are always open. We see what “is,” and we also see “what can be.” We are always doing hitpallal, self-judging. We swim in an ocean of spirituality  held buoyant by Torah values.

One final point before this week’s d’var Torah ends. Next week is Shabbat Zachor and Purim.  We are commanded to remember Amalek. We fulfill this mitzvah by reading three  verses from Deuteronomy on next week’s Shabbat, in addition to this parasha (Deut.  25:17-19). Amalek was a tribe that snuck up on the rear of our camp, killing  some of our women and children. We were told by God to always remember them.

This special Shabbat Zachor precedes Purim, as Haman, we are taught, was a descendant  of Agog, king of the Amaleks. Most of our sages interpret this to always be  on guard for anti-Semites who are set out to destroy us. Unfortunately, the disease of Amalek is not confined to those outside of our religion. Each of us has the capacity to be Amalek. Thank God most of us keep that part of us, the yetzer  ha ra,  in check.

But there are those of us, many who have positions in our very synagogues, temples, and shuls that engage in murderous behavior. The  Chofetz Chaim  (Rabbi Kagen ) teaches that one who does lashon  ha ra,  gossips, bad mouths, even if the information is true, murders three people: the subject, the person they speak to, and their own self. The Talmud (Beracoth) also  says that one who snubs or does not respond to a greeting in a similar matter is also a murderer as they cause the blood to drain from a person’s  face and cause intended good will to be destroyed.

Our temples, which house our sanctuaries, were meant to be places of refuge from the sinful behavior that is found on the streets. If we go to our temples to do offerings with  the service of our hearts, to study to gain closeness to God, to do kavenah- filled tephila so we can become better people, can we truly accomplish this while witnessing Amalek-type behavior?